EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

When Alice has her day in court in front of the King of Hearts in the matter of the tarts, a guinea-pig becomes overexcited and is suppressed by playing-card soldiers putting him in a bag and sitting on it. I had assumed Michael Gove had undergone something genteelly similar at the hands of the Conservatives but too soon. With muffled roar, the self-styled ‘slavish backbencher’ addresses the world (a conference in Dubai – how much?) from within the bag. ‘London schools’ success is due to aspirational immigrants’ he trumpets. They have raised standards because of their high expectations! Simultaneously, they have prevented ‘some people’ from getting places at good schools! In other parts of the sceptred isle it hasn’t gone so well! With a message for those who like to criticise immigrants and teachers equally he’s back in our ears. Good and bad at once! Tricky, eh?

My head still rotating on its stalk I stepped out into the corridor for un-Goved air. I exchanged cordial greetings with the young people and advised on matters from precise location of the Exams Office to the correct carriage of a basketball in an enclosed space. They smiled and grumped their way to class in this corner of world city where ‘immigrant’ really only means that you might speak more languages than the next person tripping over his feet.

It’s a stupid smokescreen from one of the great communicators of modern politics, part of a revisionist plot to remove the impact of funding from the legacy of the London Challenge. Simultaneously saying that non-immigrant parents aren’t involved in schools or want great things for their children while saying that immigration works in London but not in the north he only manages to illuminate the thing he tries to mask. It’s the economy, stupid.

People from all over the world make London a wonderful place to be no matter what, but schools don’t run on ambition and aspiration. If that was so, Oxford and Cambridge would be full of the children of the poor. Schooling for social mobility works when aspiration is generated, harnessed, transformed into a successful education by gifted and valued teachers in stable and respected schools. One of the things the London Challenge tackled from 2003 was the unhelpful distribution of those schools. Expensively, government set about four controversial policies to improve London’s education: the challenge itself, which involved school-to-school support and big data; Teach First; the academisation programme and higher expectations of challenge and support from local authorities. London children were funded well in schools who were given the cash to release teachers to share and learn across the city. It worked, demonstrated by the well-worn but nonetheless remarkable statistic that London thereby became the only capital in the world where achievement is higher than the national average.

What Gove doesn’t say is that before he got involved in 2010 there was investment in teaching, training and release time, for thinking and learning, and that there was money to go with the aspiration, and a plan. He doesn’t want to say that because he took the money away and, as a slavish backbencher, he has to support a range of harmful and destructive policies. There will be no release time in the future. There will be no training in the future. There will be no sharing of good practice and no learning from the best. There will be fewer teachers, not more – 6% fewer applications this year at a time of shortage - and there will be little support from the local authorities now almost starved to death.

Oh, and those ‘refugees from Somalia or Kosovo’ who arrived new in our schools? They were welcomed with language programmes, counselling when they needed it, tailored curricula and intensive intervention to get them up to speed. Their parents looked for help from an education system for which they’d travelled halfway round the world, and they got it. Where the journey had nearly killed them, we helped put them back together. Now we’re taking it apart.

And why hasn’t that happened for refugees from the same places who fetched up in Sunderland or Scunthorpe? Follow the money: it was underfunded schools that will stay underfunded while London schools become underfunded. It was grinding poverty with no shiny city on the doorstep. So when Gove says that success in London was solely because of the aspiration of children and their parents he says it because that comes free, in the free air of the world city – so we can do it without the visionary public investment we once had. Shame on him.

In better news, the Year 13 BTEC farewell music performance by Streamlined was sublime. The Danes who visited us and built recycled models were charming. The Tallis Centre for Contemporary Arts is beautiful. The pi competition was sheer entertainment. And in my close surveillance of year 8s some of whose habits are not yet Tallis Habits, I’ve chanced upon a tiny diverting commentator whose favourite adjective is ‘tedious’. Gove is tedious. Back in the bag with him. As the King said ‘If that’s all you know about it, you may stand down’.

CR23.3.17

What are the values and principles that underpin great leadership? Could expressing those make a better education system? In this article for the ASCL's Leader magazine I share my thoughts and ask for yours on proposals for a new Commission on Ethical Leadership in Education.

I like hoo-ha and am a great user of malarkey. I’m fond of kerfuffle, but was shocked when I first saw its spelling. These come to mind in the results season when the tone and atmosphere of the national discourse about A levels has traditionally reached febrile heights. There’s the generation of outrage, the deliberate obfuscation and the scuffling in the undergrowth to see whose figures can match which rigid opinion. Today’s story of a 0.6 per cent increase in the number of A* grades and a decrease of 0.1 per cent in the overall pass rate isn’t really news in any recognisable sense. ‘Exam Results Stable Again’ won’t really generate queues round the block to buy papers. No hoo-ha over exams being easier? No things-ain’t-what-they-used-to-be malarkey? No kerfuffle over too few places for too many students? I may be tempting fate in this early afternoon of results day, but the news seems pretty quiet out there.

Therefore, allow me to fill the space. We’re pretty pleased with our results here at Tallis, our best ever. We’re pleased for our young people who’ve got what they need to go to university and we’re confident that we can support those who’ll rethink their plans. The internet makes the whole UCAS process much simpler and quicker now most young people know if they’ve got into university by the time they come to school to get the results. It’s a bit more humane than it used to be, I think. Is it as good as it could be? Here are a few questions. Wouldn’t post-qualification university application take some more uncertainty out of the system? Universities argue that it would disadvantage academically able applicants from poorer backgrounds, but would it have to? We’d have to change the shape of our year, both in school and university, but isn’t that overdue? Wouldn’t it be more transparent? Isn’t that a good in public life? How well are we served by having competing commercial examination boards? Why are our young people’s futures left up to an (admittedly regulated) market? Is the government going to make a quiet u-turn on the Goveite AS fiasco? When schools and universities agree that AS grades aid transparency in university admission and career planning does it really need to be a political issue? When the Secretary of State for Education Secretary says the government is "lifting the cap on aspiration" what on earth does that mean? Does the quiet news today suggest that education is becoming less of a political football? I’m grateful for an A level results day that hasn’t seen our hard work disparaged by defenders of a system designed to generate an elite rather than educate the nation. I may raise a glass (tonight) to the teachers and parents who have worked, worried and loved our students through to adulthood. I’ll certainly raise one to year 13 themselves who, despite the trials and indignities of adolescence, the incessant fiddling about with education throughout their entire school careers and the ambivalent attitude this society has towards its young, have come through. So here’s to the elated and the tearful, to your futures close to home or in a new city, to the difference you’ll make and the citizens you’ll be. Let’s hope that Tallis really has given you an education to understand the world and change it for the better. Good luck, don’t forget us, and thank you for sharing your lives with us.